The Hopeful Monsters

Larry Hardesty went to grade school on a scholarship from the Washington Cathedral Choir. When he was 12, he wrote a 64-bar piano piece celebrating Leonard Bernstein's 64th birthday, which Bernstein himself declared "touching and gifted". But Larry's classical-music ambitions were derailed when he discovered that the girls at his high school preferred the pop song he'd knocked off in an evening with his friend Brad to his chronically incomplete piano scores. He blitzed through the University of Virginia in three years--English major, music minor--so he could play keyboards for his first professional band, the Young Men Carbuncular, which moved to Boston in the summer of 1991. The band fell apart within a year, no doubt in part because of its terrible name.

Brant Grieshaber entered the Berklee College of Music intending to become the next Great Rock Instrumentalist but found himself overwhelmed by the sheer variety of the types of music he'd never really listened to before. After detours into composition and music production, he eventually majored in film scoring--though he still found time to study guitar with Garrison Fewell. Later, as a grad student at the Boston Conservatory, he studied composition with Osvaldo Golijov. In addition to his work with the Hopeful Monsters, Brant plays solo classical guitar, plays jazz guitar with several groups, and teaches guitar in Boston. His website is rbrantg.com.